Fallout: Wasteland Warfare is getting a second edition later this year, and praise the atom, it looks like it's going to be far simpler than the overwrought original. I was given a brief demo of the revised Fallout miniature wargame at Adepticon, and was relieved to discover the rules have been greatly streamlined. This could be a perfect excuse to bring publisher Modiphius' excellent range of Fallout miniatures out of the vault and onto the tabletop wasteland.
The first edition of Wasteland Warfare is something of a mutant hybrid, a miniature wargame with both co-operative and competitive game modes, and a level of rules detail you'd normally only find in an RPG. The thing is, Modiphius already makes a full fat Fallout TTRPG, and has a dedicated skirmish wargame called Fallout Factions, and they're both far more focused designs.
So for Wasteland Warfare second edition Modiphius has steered the design away from the other two systems, focusing the rules primarily on solo and co-operative narrative wargaming. Players will control survivors as they explore the wastelands and confront AI-controlled raiders, mutants, robots, and more.
During my demo I got to see the new system for enemy AI behaviour in action. it promises to be much lighter than first edition, where controlling NPCs was effectively the same as playing the game against yourself. In fact, the new system generates behaviour not unlike the enemy AI in the Bethesda Fallout videogames, and without the glitches.
Moving or acting in front of an enemy, or injuring another enemy close to them, will raise their alertness level, an aggro stat that you track with tokens. When it's the NPC's turn whichever one is most alert will act, and its tokens turn into a budget of actions for it to burn through as it comes to ruin your day.
Different classes of enemy follow different behaviour scripts, so my demo game saw super mutant hounds bound straight towards the player characters as we wandered onto the board, while a super mutant with a minigun ominously closed the distance from the far side of a derelict truck, ready to shower us with lead.
Nothing huge and flashy, then, just a functional system. And frankly I'm glad to see it. The first edition of Wasteland Warfare used a lot of cards, custom symbols, and custom dice, all of which required learning and memorization.
While it was kind of neat that every little bit of junk down to a bottle of Nuka Cola had its own stat card, the overall effect just wasn't that different from a regular skirmish game, at least for my tastes. Second edition cuts out the cards altogether, and trims the dice symbols way back - though it doesn't shed custom dice completely.
The Wasteland Warfare miniature range is gorgeous, so to my mind, anything that makes it easier for people to play with them is welcome. A spokesperson at Modiphius' booth said the whole range of Wasteland Warfare miniatures will get updated rules for second edition, though not necessarily on the day that the core rules launch.
Are you a fan of the existing Wasteland Warfare with an immaculately organised collection of item cards sad to see them go? Or someone who has always been tempted by the miniatures but never gotten over the game's symbol-dense stat cards? We'd love to hear from you in the official Wargamer Discord community!